Betrayed and Reborn, I Won't Save You Twice

When company-wide layoffs sweep through the firm, a department manager holds the single exemption pass, and everyone assumes it will go to his wife. Instead, he gives it to a newly hired single mother. That same afternoon, she signs her severance paperwork and, beside it, their divorce agreement.

Three years later, she has become a senior department director at another leading firm. Her ex-husband arrives as a vendor representative, pitching a partnership his struggling company needs to survive. The moment he sees her, he freezes. She tells him there will be no deal, and when he pleads that his mother is sick and he needs this, she reminds him of the brother who once fought for his life while she needed her job.

He protests that he only pitied the single mother, that things worked out for her in the end. She remembers the debts, the sold heirlooms, the nights in a dingy rental, and the seventeen nights on hospital hallway chairs. Cold-hearted, he calls her. Compared to him, she answers, she is an amateur.